Survival Instincts is a combination first person game and radio play. It is based on how the idea of narrative space would work in a story that is essentially ‘mapped’ out on graph paper.
The story is told from a single character's point of view and digresses into flashbacks that ultimately explain what is happening in the present moment. Part of the design was to watch it unfold over time, so the breaks and slowly appearing lexias are built in. The reader is given options of how the story should proceed, yet the eventual ending is predetermined. The agency of the reader in that sense is limited. The piece is primarily inspired by how a story could develop across intersecting plot arcs.
One of the things I realized while working with Twine was that coming to it with a pre-formed story idea does not work. I ended up discarding my original idea because what I had wanted to do (work from a primarily image based perspective) was not possible with this platform. Like all literary/genre forms, it appears that using a particular software in digital literature could conceivably work on a similar format of genre conventions.
It was an interesting experiment in understanding the complexity of computer language that underlies the final digital literature piece we usually only see as the finished product. I probably spent more time playing with the code and design of the piece than I did with the actual story development also. The sheer potential offered by choice of color, font, background and sound that could work to enhance the actual text itself is more the focus of my piece that anything else. I was also able to play around with it due to my familiarity with coding on a basic level, which is really all one needs when working with Twine. The extensive online forum and other IF author’s willingness to share their knowledge also points to how interactive the process itself of writing an IF can be – as much as the text itself is structured to be.
Title: Survival Instincts
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Survival Instincts.html
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Reflection on Process
Survival Instincts is a combination first person game and radio play. It is based on how the idea of narrative space would work in a story that is essentially ‘mapped’ out on graph paper.
The story is told from a single character's point of view and digresses into flashbacks that ultimately explain what is happening in the present moment. Part of the design was to watch it unfold over time, so the breaks and slowly appearing lexias are built in. The reader is given options of how the story should proceed, yet the eventual ending is predetermined. The agency of the reader in that sense is limited. The piece is primarily inspired by how a story could develop across intersecting plot arcs.
One of the things I realized while working with Twine was that coming to it with a pre-formed story idea does not work. I ended up discarding my original idea because what I had wanted to do (work from a primarily image based perspective) was not possible with this platform. Like all literary/genre forms, it appears that using a particular software in digital literature could conceivably work on a similar format of genre conventions.
It was an interesting experiment in understanding the complexity of computer language that underlies the final digital literature piece we usually only see as the finished product. I probably spent more time playing with the code and design of the piece than I did with the actual story development also. The sheer potential offered by choice of color, font, background and sound that could work to enhance the actual text itself is more the focus of my piece that anything else. I was also able to play around with it due to my familiarity with coding on a basic level, which is really all one needs when working with Twine. The extensive online forum and other IF author’s willingness to share their knowledge also points to how interactive the process itself of writing an IF can be – as much as the text itself is structured to be.